


Half Light

by crinklefries



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst, Immortality, Loneliness, M/M, Magical Realism, Minor Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Slow Build, Suicidal Ideation, pure romance, sad with a romance, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 18:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14361192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/pseuds/crinklefries
Summary: His favorite statue is the one at the end of the gallery, not too far from the bench. It’s the beautiful, carved figure of a Norse god, a man who was sculpted with such care that Loki can feel the tension trembling under his muscles, the power running beneath the surface of the stone.Sometimes, Loki looks at him for hours at a time and wonders what he is so angry about, why he is in such a hurry, what he could possibly have been caught doing. Does he mean to destroy or does he mean to protect? By the lines of his shoulders, Loki cannot tell.The inscription at the base of the statue readsThor, and Loki wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to be the God of Thunder.*Or;Loki is a lonely immortal and Thor is a sculpture who comes to life, for him, every night.





	Half Light

**Author's Note:**

> This is a partly sad and wholly soft fic inspired in part by this beautiful artwork on tumblr by [10000ta](https://10000ta.tumblr.com/post/172869035848) and in part by the song "[Half Light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SE1WaaNzW0)" by Banners. I saw one and I heard the other and into my head came a premise I couldn't stop thinking about and a story that almost wrote itself.
> 
> I hope it's as lovely to read as it was soothing for me to write. ♥

**part one.**

i.

There’s a grey stone bench that sits at the end of the pristine, white stone gallery at the Met. It’s under one of the many gracefully carved arches, nestled in front of large windows that span from the smooth white floor to the high ceiling, high above the arch. In the winter, snow falls at intervals outside, dark clouds hanging heavy in the air, bare spires of trees eating into the grey sky. In the summer, the window glows with sunlight, the bright of the sun and the smoothness of the blue washing through the panes of glass and settling around his long limbs.

He never sits hunched, but he curves into himself sometimes, a sketchpad on his lap, the balls of his feet tapping lightly against the ground. Sometimes, his hair is pulled back to help keep him from distraction, and sometimes it falls gently around his face and shoulders, a dark sheet willing to hide him even if nothing else will. Sometimes someone will ask to sit next to him and he will allow it. Other times, someone will ask to talk to him and he will give them a smile, cool around the edges, not sinister, but not warm either. People don’t linger long.

He prefers it this way.

He has been alive for an eternity, Loki.

  
ii. 

He has been alone for that long, as well.

  
iii.

Loki cannot really remember much of his childhood, but he assumes he had one. It was so long ago that the memories are almost entirely faded, worn with time and washed of color. He thinks he remembers a ship, perhaps water. He thinks maybe his parents were a captain and a whore or maybe the ship and a sea creature.

Is he human?

He could not say and he has never tried.

He thinks maybe he was born in a castle in the sky or a palace deep under the water.

It’s likely he wasn’t born at all, but crafted out of the bones of a giant or the heart of a dragon.

Sometimes, he draws what he thinks his birth must have been like and then he crumples the drawing and throws it in the bin, laughing.

Of course he is not myth or a god, but a human.

He is a human who was struck by lightning and given the gift of immortality.

  
iv.  
  
No, perhaps it’s a curse, instead.

  
v.  
  
Drawing has been the only thing that has soothed him in all of the centuries he’s been alive. He has no conception of whether his drawings are any good, but he has drawn for hundreds of years and he will continue to draw for hundreds more.

Once, he was able to craft stories and universes out of his words, but these days, he speaks less.

His coworkers have noticed a change in him.

“Hey,” Bucky said to him just this morning. Bucky’s cubicle is across from Loki’s own. Their firm does accounting work, handling big name clients that often amuse Loki in their grandiosity. He remembers when they were nothing more than the seeds of a thought in their parent’s minds.

Loki, who had been absentmindedly doodling, had looked up.

He used to be better at pretending to give a shit, but lately his immortality has been wearing on him. He’s always found numbers to be rather uncreative, but fifty years ago he had decided this was as good a way to spend time as any and here he is, fifty years later, putting numbers into spreadsheets.

He’s good at math, incidentally, but it’s hard not to be good at everything when you’ve been alive for what seems the length of the world.

“You haven’t said a word this entire week,” Bucky said. He was leaning against the cubicle, arms crossed at his chest. Bucky Barnes had transferred into this firm about five years ago and despite his better judgment, Loki had found in him a friend.

Bucky shifted. “To anyone.”

“Oh,” Loki blinked. He tried to remember the last time he spoke, but he couldn’t recall. “It’s been busy.”

“No it hasn’t,” Bucky snorted. “You’ve been drawing all week.”

Loki looked down at his doodles.

“That obvious?” he asked.

“I know what spreadsheet hell looks like,” Bucky offered a wry smile. “And that’s not it.”

Loki capped his pen and tilted his head.

“I guess I’ve been distracted.”

“No shit,” Bucky said. “Do you have SAD?”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “Is that how that word is meant to be used?”

“No, dumbshit,” Bucky said. “SAD. Seasonal Affective Disorder. People go stir crazy as the seasons change.”

“Ah,” Loki said.

It’s likely he has some form of SAD, but it isn’t seasons. It’s the turn of years, the progression of decades. There’s nothing to mark time when time is meaningless and that’s a concept even Loki hasn’t learned to process.

Bucky gave Loki an appraising look and perhaps he really had been distant, because Loki couldn’t find a single thing to say to him.

“You should go to the Met,” Bucky said eventually. “They re-opened that sculpture gallery you like.”

Loki had a brief memory of telling Bucky about the sculpture gallery. About how calm he felt among them, statues preserved through time. Each of them were people, stories caught in stone. Bucky Barnes was a good friend.

“Yes,” Loki said and even mustered a smile for Bucky. “Actually, that’s a great idea, Bucky. Thank you.”

  
vi.  
  
He has no real sense of time, but he loses most of his time whenever he’s in the sculpture gallery. He sits on his bench at the end of the hall, sketchpad on his lap, charcoal pencil or watercolors in his hand, and he sketches as the sun rises and peaks and colors as the sun sets and sky darkens. Sometimes he’ll listen to music and smile. On good days, he’ll whistle.

Almost always, when he’s here, he will sit, completely still, food and water forgotten, until the Met closes and a guard has to ask him to leave.

Then, and only then, will Loki blink, put away his pencil and colors and paper, and breathe.

  
vii.  
  
His favorite statue is the one at the end of the gallery, not too far from the bench. It’s the beautiful, carved figure of a Norse god, a man who was sculpted with such care that Loki can feel the tension trembling under his muscles, the power running beneath the surface of the stone. He has a strong nose and large eyes, thick eyebrows furrowed in concern, or perhaps displeasure. His hair is long, spilling over his shoulder and down his back, part of it swept back, two braids decorating the side. One arm is pulled back taught and in it is a large hammer with Nordic inscriptions carved into the handle. There’s a cloak that cascades down his back and the rest of him is in a draped tunic, pinned to his body with a belt at his waist and to his cloak by two circular pieces. The tunic hits the middle of his thighs and leaves the rest of the muscle uncovered. His feet are clad in sandals.

He is at once in motion and utterly still.

He is terrifying and magnificent.

Sometimes, Loki looks at him for hours at a time and wonders what he is so angry about, why he is in such a hurry, what he could possibly have been caught doing. Does he mean to destroy or does he mean to protect? By the lines of his shoulders, Loki cannot tell.

The inscription at the base of the statue reads _Thor_ , and Loki wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to be the God of Thunder.

  
viii.

Sometimes, when it’s very late and Loki is done drawing for the night, he sits next to Thor and talks to him.

“I don’t suppose you were a very good god of thunder,” he says wryly. “Aren’t the prayers and sacrifices of your people supposed to keep you alive? What good are you as a god of stone?”

  
He sits, cross-legged, facing Thor.

“Were you a god before a man? Or were you man before a god? Can you be both simultaneously?”

He leaves unsaid, _sometimes I feel to be both and sometimes I feel I am neither._

  
Sometimes, he reaches forward and brushes his fingers over the engraving at the base.

“I don’t suppose i would be a very good god either, to be fair,” Loki says with a laugh. “Loki, the god of spreadsheets. Loki, the god of mischief. Yes, I do not look it now, but I was quite mischievous at some point in my youth. That was just many years ago.”

He leans back on his hands, looks up at Thor, and grins.

“I was not, however, always good at spreadsheets.”

  
ix.

They both know the truth, though.

He is Loki, the God of Immortality.

Loki, the God of Loneliness.

Or perhaps he is not a god at all, but some form of demon.

  
x.  
  
Sometimes, he reaches forward and brushes his fingers against Thor’s bare toes. He runs the pads of his fingertips along the curves of the toenails, across and up the straps of his sandals. Once, when it is just him and no others in the gallery, he caresses Thor’s ankle.

He holds his breath.

It seems like a prayer, almost.

  
xi.  
  
He doesn’t talk to any of the other sculptures and he doesn’t really know why.

  
There’s something about Thor. Perhaps it’s his passion, uncontrollable even in a life of marble. Or perhaps it’s his face, somehow open and expressive at the same time it is so terrible and angry. He of all the statues looks as though he might be listening.

Or perhaps it’s because Loki remembers, the only memory of his childhood, a frightened child with ink black hair and bright green eyes, looking up at an ancient tree and being struck down by lightning.

  
xii.

The more he thinks about it, the less he can stop remembering it.

The very moment his life froze, caught for eternity, like a marble statue, with more sorrow.

  
xiii.

“Are you the reason I cannot die?” he asks Thor once, on a particularly low day, when he thinks about the people he has loved and how they are or will become dust. It is the day he feels the weight of his eternity and cannot bear it a second longer.

Loki stands in front of the statue, trembling with anger, or perhaps grief.

“Was it you?” he remembers vividly the day he was struck by lightning. He cannot stop remembering it now. “Why did you give me eternal life if you were to leave me alone for all of it?”

Loki turns his back to the statue in disgust. He wants to weep, or to break Thor altogether.

He doesn’t return to the sculpture gallery for a month after that.

  
  
**part two.**

  
i.

It happens the night he finally gives in and comes back.

He sits on his stone bench, etching and re-etching scenes from the gallery. A mother squatting in front of her daughter. A pair of lovers, holding hands. A dog, patiently waiting while his owner looks at a sculpture.

He loses time again, drawing until the light through the glass panes is dark.

He looks up when he hears a sudden groaning, a smooth scraping sound, like two slabs of marble sliding against one other.

He sees nothing for a moment.

Then, he turns his head.

To his right, sitting next to him, a magnificent, unearthly, blond god.

  
ii.

“You returned,” Thor says gently.

His voice is deep and warm, rivulets of water running across Loki’s skin.

Thor watches him intently, softly. His eyes are a bright, bright blue.

“I have been waiting for you, for so long.”

  
iii.

Loki opens and closes his mouth. What he’s seeing is unbelievable, which is remarkable because he is immortal himself. But immortality is one thing. This—this is something else.

“Are you all right?” Thor asks. His features cloud with concern. “Is that why you have been gone, Loki? Have you been ill?”

He might be ill, in fairness. This might finally be the incontrovertible proof that he is and has lost his mind.

“How do you know my name?” he asks instead.

Now Thor’s features lighten. He smiles broadly. It is almost blinding to look at.

“You have told me many times, of course,” Thor says. “Did you think I was not listening?”

Loki looks at Thor as though—well, as though he’s a statue that’s just come to life.

“I am going insane,” he says aloud. “Barnes was right. I need help.”

“Help?” Thor asks. “What kind of help? Tell me so that I may help you. I would like to help.”

“You could stop talking, for starters,” Loki nearly hisses.

“Does my voice displease you?” Thor queries.

The opposite, if Loki is telling the truth. Thor’s voice is so pleasant, it’s as though the universe took all of Loki’s thoughts and desires and blended them into this one living god statue’s timbre.

“You aren’t real,” Loki says. “You’re a statue.”

“Who’s to say who is and who is not real?” Thor asks jovially. “You say I am not real, but you talk to me every night. You say I am not real, but here I am, beside you.”

“Yes,” Loki says, dryly. “I should take philosophical advice from my hallucination.”

Thor laughs. It’s robust. The other statues in the gallery shudder a little under the weight of it.

“Why would you rather be insane than believe what your eyes and ears tell you?” he asks.

Loki looks at him dubiously.

“My eyes and ears can be tricked. They’re not always to be trusted.”

Thor smiles at him, kindly. Loki has not had someone look at him with such warmth in centuries.

“How about here?” Thor asks. He reaches forward and his fingers brush the spot just above Loki’s heart. Under his fingertips, Loki’s heart skips carefully. “Can this be trusted?”

Loki looks at Thor.

His hair, pulled back, just as when he’s a statue, is golden. It shines richly under the Met lights. His face is scruffy, covered with a golden beard. His skin, visible at his throat and at the swell of his arms, and the bare stretch of thick legs under the soft, white sheet of his tunic, is a beautiful tan. His cape is a deep, deep red.

He is in all and everything, a god.

Loki’s heart stutters again.

“Yes,” he says finally.

Thor smiles again.

“And what does this tell you?”

Loki swallows his cynicism and answers honestly.

“That you’re real.”

Thor beams as though light itself were being created within him.

And so he was.

  
iv.

“How does it work?” Loki asks.

They sit side by side on the bench. Loki’s sketch pad is forgotten, resting in between them.

“What do you mean?” Thor asks.

“How do you come to life?” Loki looks at Thor and it’s unbelievable that the man beside him is a statue. He’s a statue in a metaphorical sense, so beautiful that it’s overwhelming to Loki. But he’s real. He moves and speaks and even has a scent to him. Something clean and earthy, like clay.

“I do not know,” Thor admits. “It only happens at night.”

“What does it feel like?” Loki puts out a hand, palm up, and Thor does not even question it. He places his own hand over it.

His palm is firm, soft and calloused at the same time. Heat rolls off his skin.

“During the day it feels slow, as though I am seeing and hearing everything through material. I can feel your presence, but I cannot move to let mine know. I can hear, but at a distance. Everything is too bright.”

Loki swallows and keeps their palms pressed together.

“And at night?”

“I come awake,” Thor says. His joy is strong, his exuberance unmasked or unable to be. “I take a deep breath and everything within me becomes unmade and remade. I see everything in color and feel everything intensely.”

“Are you the only one?” Loki asks.

“Yes,” Thor says sadly. “It is only me. It is lonely.”

That, Loki can feel too. He feels it roll off Thor in waves. Even his eyes look sad.

“Why haven’t you shown yourself before?” Loki asks.

“Because I was afraid,” Thor admits.

“And why have you shown yourself now?” Loki demands.

Thor softens.

“Because I was more afraid you would not come back.”

  
v.

“Where do you go when you leave here?” Thor asks.

“Home,” Loki says. Or a version of it, as hollow as it is.

“What is it like?” Thor asks. He shifts toward Loki and the light catches in his hair, illuminates the slope of his nose and the curve of his mouth.

“Clean,” Loki says. “Empty.”

He had stopped forming attachments to belongings long ago. What he kept now, he kept out of necessity. The moment he needed to leave again, he would leave it behind without a second thought. It was easier to cut ties than to keep them.

That makes Thor look sad.

“Why do you not fill it?” Thor asks.

“With what?” Loki replies, despite himself.

Thor touches the edge of the sketchpad, traces the lines of Loki’s latest sketch. It’s the statue at the end of the gallery, another one, anonymous. He doesn’t have the same life as Thor, but Loki’s captured him all the same.

“What you love,” Thor says finally. “You should fill it with the things you love.”

“I don’t love anything,” Loki says.

To which Thor replies, “I think you might love too much.”

And how Thor could know that or what Thor could see, Loki doesn’t know, but it makes him feel melancholy in a way that’s unreachable.

“I should like to see it,” Thor says, after they’ve been silent for a while. “Your home.”

“It’s not that great,” Loki says. “It’s only fine.”

Thor, for his part, looks stricken.

“It is yours, Loki,” he says. “Therefore it could never be anything but great.”  
  
  
vi.  
  
“What is it like?” Loki asks.

They’ve stood up and are pacing the stretch of the empty gallery, side by side. Loki is tall, but Thor is taller. Every time they stop, their elbows jostle.

Thor looks at him as though every word he says is something he wishes to drink from.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Listening,” Loki says. “To everyone, all the time.”

Thor considers this and they begin their stroll again.

“I don’t,” Thor says, finally.

“Don’t what?” Loki asks.

“Listen to everyone,” Thor says.

“You listened to me,” Loki says.

And Thor smiles.

“You are the only one who had something worth hearing.”

  
vii.

When Thor stands in front of a statue, he stills with his entire body, almost as though even alive, he remembers what it is like to be inanimate. Loki thinks maybe he can hear the statue in front of him, or maybe, in it, he finds a kindred spirit.

Loki looks at him without caution. His eyes sweep along the back of Thor’s head, the golden hair pinned up near the middle, down the back of his golden neck, and across his hopelessly broad shoulders. From the back, the cape hides more than the front, but even the red cloth cannot mute the power in Thor’s stance, the sheer magnificence of him simply existing, simply standing there.

Loki wants to know what it would feel like, to press the palm of his hand to the muscles of Thor’s back.

He takes in a deep, shallow breath and Thor turns around and catches him looking.

Thor could take Loki in his arms, crush him without taking a breath. He could fit a single hand to Loki’s throat and curve it all the way around. He could press his mouth to Loki’s jaw until his skin turns red with burn.

He could take Loki and make him beg for more.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he smiles and takes another step down the gallery.

Loki shudders and follows.

  
viii.

They talk until the lights begin to dim. Too soon, a security guard shuffles in the room next to the gallery.

“I must go now,” Thor says.

Loki nods and gets up and Thor does the same.

Thor looks at Loki hesitantly, then reaches out. He places a warm, heavy hand on Loki’s shoulder.

“Will you come back again, Loki?”

Loki looks at the hand on his shoulder and then at the god in front of him.

“I will consider it,” he says, which is to keep him from saying _how could I say no?_

“Then I will wait for you again,” Thor says. His expression is all of the grave sincerity of a man going off to war.

He steps away from Loki and back up onto his pedestal.

The guard comes around the corner.

“Museum’s closing, sir,” he says, looking pointedly at Loki.

Loki nods and looks back toward Thor.

On the pedestal, he’s frozen into marble again, one arm behind him, weighed down by a hammer.

Loki feels disappointed, a strange sense of loss in his chest.

He takes his leave, the feeling of Thor’s hand lingering long after he’s come back home.

  
  
**part three.**

  
i. 

He comes back the next day.

And then the next.

And then the day after that.

He draws during the day and takes strolls around the sculpture gallery at night.

“Is this the only room you can walk in?” Loki asks.

“I do not know,” Thor says. “I am afraid to try.”

Someone as strong and large as Thor does not seem as though they would have many fears or, at least, admit to any of them, but Thor is not afraid to express his anxieties.

“I had a brother,” he tells Loki. “Baldur. I do not know what happened to him.”

“I had a brother,” Loki tells him. “Hellbindi. He died many centuries ago.”

“You have lost a lot,” Thor says. He watches Loki’s face closely.

“You’ve lost more,” Loki says and for the first time in a long time, he’s struck with awe and he’s struck with sympathy.

“It is all right,” Thor says with a smile and Loki thinks there’s a twinkle in his eyes as he does. “I’ve gained some too.”

  
ii.

They are, both of them, alone and unmoored in this hard, long world.

  
iii.

“Why do you never draw me?” Thor asks one night.

Loki, hands pressed to the glass pane of the window, looks at him, startled.

“What?”

“You draw everyone and everything else. But never me.” Thor looks at him curiously. “Why?”

Loki has books upon books filled with sketches of Thor. Even before he came to life, Loki was drawing him.

“You are just so ugly, you see,” Loki says instead.

Thor looks hurt for just a moment before Loki gives him a smirk.

Then he throws back his head and laughs.

  
iv.

“Do you really think I am ugly?” Thor asks.

They’re sitting on the floor, facing each other, legs crossed, knees touching.

“Do you think you’re ugly?” Loki asks.

“I am the most beautiful god in all the realms,” Thor says, indignant.

Loki can’t help it, he just starts giggling.

Thor looks like he’s going to protest, but his shoulders slump slightly at the last moment.

“But not even gods are the most beautiful creatures,” he says and he’s looking at Loki just as he says it, but Loki doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  
v.

“All right then,” Thor says the next night. He puts a large hand out.

Loki, who has been scrolling through work emails on his phone, looks up at him and raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to draw you,” Thor declares.

“Me.” Loki blinks. “Have you ever drawn before in your life?”

“How dare you!” Thor exclaims in outrage. “I am the _God of Thunder_!”

“Yes,” Loki says, dryly. “I was not aware that is now synonymous with the God of Charcoal Drawings.

  
Thor gets the sketch pad and pencil anyway. He draws while Loki browses through his phone.

Loki’s phone suddenly rings.

“Yes?” he says as he answers.

Whoever it is on the other line says something.  

“No,” he says softly. “I am too old for parties.”

Another silence.

“I am not depressed, Barnes. But thank you for your armchair psychology.”

Another silence, longer this time.

Loki sighs and looks up at Thor. Thor is listening and watching and drawing all at the same time.

“Fine,” Loki says, curtly. “Send me the address.”

He hangs up the phone and shakes his head.

“Are you leaving?” Thor asks. He sounds as though he is trying not to be sad and failing sorely at it.

“Eventually,” Loki says and puts away the phone. “Now, you were going to draw me a masterpiece?”

  
Eventually does come, but not before Thor shares his drawing.

Loki takes one look at it and let’s out an indignant squawk.

“My nose is not that big! And why do I have noodles growing from my skull!”

  
vi.

Loki has no desire to be at a party of people he doesn’t know and will never come to know.

“You came!” Bucky Barnes looks bright and happy and drunk.

Next to him is a large, muscular blond with luminescent blue eyes and a sheepish, pink smile.

“Loki, this is my—this is Steve.”

“Nice to meet you, Steve,” Loki says.

Steve shakes hands with Loki because Steve, it turns out, is a gentleman.

  
Loki is pretty sure Steve is fucking Bucky, but that’s another matter entirely.

  
He gets handed a cup and he spends the entire party nursing his one drink.

Bucky gets pulled away by someone and Steve has no one else to talk to, so he and Loki talk. Luckily, Steve is not only kind and funny, but he’s interesting too. He’s an artist and loves the Met.

“The sculpture gallery is my favorite,” Loki says, absentmindedly.

“Oh I love that place,” Steve says, taking a mouthful of his drink. “Have you seen that one statue? It’s near the end. The Norse God of Thunder, Thor.”

Loki feels something thrill in his stomach.

“Once or twice,” Loki says with a smile.

“It’s the weirdest thing,” Steve says. “Lately, whenever I go back, he looks less angry to me. I swear last time I saw him, he looked like he was about to smile.”

  
vii.

Loki watches Steve and Bucky out of the corner of his eyes the rest of the night. The way they are aware of one another is remarkable. The way they treat one another, carefully and thoughtfully, touches featherlight and firm, is something that makes Loki stop and close his eyes.

No, this is not just fucking.

When Bucky watches Steve, his entire face shines with unrestrained emotion, and when Steve looks at Bucky, Loki feels a punch to his stomach.

He looks away.

He feels a hollow ache in his chest and the ghost of a hand on his shoulder.

  
viii.

Whenever Loki leaves the Met, Thor stands frozen in place, alone, standing still in time and place, no company but for moonlight.

It fills the pit of Loki’s stomach with dread and hot, burning, guilt, but there’s nothing he can do about it either.

  
ix.

“You came back,” Thor says every time, beaming, face caught between something like anxiety and something like relief and something like the unshakeable belief that he had trusted Loki to honor his word all along.

“What would you do if I did not?” Loki smiles wryly. “What would you do without me?”

Thor laughs something warm and sad. He touches Loki’s elbow and Loki’s breath hitches briefly in his throat.

“I do not know,” Thor says, honestly. “I do not think I would come to life at all.”

Loki closes his eyes.

  
x.

He thinks he’s starting to miss Thor, even when he’s with him.

**  
part four.**

  
i.

“You really like this one, don’t you?” the guard, a large and beautiful man named Heimdall, says one day.

The man is on duty nightly and he recognizes Loki by sight and by name. Loki has half a book of paintings filled with this incomprehensibly beautiful, inexplicably golden-eyed man.

Loki looks up at Thor’s statue, immense even when still. He almost reaches out and brushes Thor’s knee, but he stops himself in time.

“He makes me think i have nothing to fear from thunder,” Loki says.

“Really?” Heimdall hums and looks at Thor. “He seems to me to have all of the anger thunder possesses.”

“Only when you do not know thunder,” Loki says.

“And do you, Loki?” Heimdall asks. He sounds strange, somehow. When Loki looks at him, Heimdall’s gaze is both contemplative and piercing.

“Do you know thunder?”

Loki presses his thumb against his opposite wrist.

“I am beginning to.”

  
ii.

“Let us go into another room,” Thor says one night. He is watching Loki fill in with watercolor a portrait of Heimdall he did earlier.

Loki looks up.

“I thought you were afraid.”

Thor’s eyes crinkle at the corners.

“What do I have to fear?” he asks. “When you are with me?”

The idiot means it, too.

  
iii.

Loki looks at Thor and he could swear the other man is nervous. He is nearly shaking with it.

“We do not have to,” Loki offers. “There is nothing wrong with the sculpture gallery.”

After a moment, Thor’s features harden.

“No. I fear nothing.”

He straightens his shoulders, grips his hammer tighter, and takes a step over the threshold into the next room.

For a moment, they both hold their breaths.

Then Thor takes another step. And then another. And then one after that.

Nothing happens.

He turns to look back to Loki and the joy that’s written across his face is blinding. It’s breathtaking. It literally takes Loki’s breath away.

“Come on,” Thor says and offers Loki a hand. “We have much to explore.”

Loki looks at him wondrously, as he hasn’t looked at anyone or anything in ages, and takes his hand.

  
iv.

Thor’s hand fits perfectly around his own. Not too large and not too small. Not too rough and not too soft. Not too warm and not too cool.

Their hands fit into one another like they were created for this and only this.

  
v.

They spend hours exploring and laughing. Loki loves the gallery of medieval portraits. He thinks they’re ugly and beautiful and when he tells Thor this, the other man laughs openly and asks, “Like me?”

“Yes, you ass,” Loki can’t help but smile. “Like you, if you were Jesus as a child with an old man’s face.”

Thor wrinkles his face and Loki wants to reach forward and smooth out those lines with his thumbs.

  
Thor, of course, loves the hall of armor.

“These are spectacular!” he insists. “They are no Mjolnir, but how I wish to don this armor. And those swords!”

“You can’t steal the armor,” Loki instructs him, although he’s not sure what the Met can do if one of their statues steals from another of their exhibits.

“These belong to warriors!” Thor says. “They are a waste on display like this.”

“We don’t have warriors anymore,” Loki says sweetly. “We have murderers.”

Thor looks at Loki with concern and Loki explains imperialism to him.

  
Sometimes, they have to duck behind other statues and display cases to avoid Heimdall, or some of the other guards, or even the other Met patrons.

“Your cape is going to get us arrested,” Loki says sourly.

“My cape is a sign of royalty and honor,” Thor protests. “And red looks magnificent on me.”

Loki sighs, but he can’t exactly disagree.

“Your cape is going to be the death of us both,” Loki says instead, deadpan.

Thor leans forward, an inch away from Loki.

“Do you think I would let death take you from me?” he asks. “I will protect you, from the guards and my cape.”

  
vi.

By the time they retire to the sculpture gallery again, they’ve only covered a small portion of the museum.

“Will you come again tomorrow?” Thor asks eagerly before he steps up on the pedestal.

“I will consider it,” Loki says as usual.

They are close, inches apart only. Thor, with his few inches, looks down at Loki. Loki breathes in the same air Thor breathes. His fingers brush the soft cloth of Thor’s tunic.

They hold still for another minute. Then Thor moves.

This time, before he freezes in place again, Thor brushes his hand into Loki’s hair.

Loki holds his breath.

Thor runs his fingers through Loki’s hair, tucks it behind his ear, and lets his hand linger against Loki’s cheekbone.

Loki lets out a shuddering breath.

Thor lets go and steps back on the pedestal.

  
vii.

Loki thinks his heart breaks when Thor does.

  
viii.

He watches the white marble crawl up from Thor’s ankles, slow and steady, as though with purpose. It creeps up his legs and sweeps across his chest, like ink spilling across a page or a gentle caress. He holds himself stock-still and it seems so unnatural, so against his very nature, that Loki could scream.

His eyes are the last to glaze over in stone and all the while, until the very moment he becomes an unseeing sculpture again, he watches Loki. He looks as though he wishes he did not have to go.

It’s always hard for Loki to watch, but this time he thinks it might break him altogether.

  
ix.  
  
“Leave before the morning guards come for their rotation,” Heimdall says to Loki.

It is a day later and Loki has come back. Not because he wanted to, but because he promised Thor, and he cannot bear the thought of Thor waking up and waiting and waiting and turning back to stone, alone and heavy with disappointment.

Loki looks at Heimdall questioningly and the guard’s golden eyes stare at a spot far to the other side of the gallery.

“Do not get caught,” the watcher says and then he leaves Loki, sketchpad in hand, staring after Heimdall in confusion and elation.

  
x.

He should not be elated, but he cannot help how he feels.

When Thor wakes up, Loki’s hand is already on his arm. Thor looks down at him as though the entire world is contained here, in Loki’s hand.

He steps down from the pedestal and Loki only hesitates for a moment before framing Thor’s face between his hands.

“Do not go to sleep tonight,” he says. “We have until the sun rises.”

  
xi.  
  
They spend the time as though it will not run out and also as though they have no more time left to give each other.

They walk around the museum, close together, hands brushing, fingers touching, stopping at times to look at something, pausing at other times to laugh at something the other has said, sometimes laughing so heartily that they lean into one another and forget to move away.

  
On one of these occasions, Loki is so overcome with mirth that Thor reaches out to touch his cheek. Loki’s laughter dries quickly, but the smile lingers.

Thor stares at him happily, hungrily.

“Immortality would not be so lonely if you were by my side,” he says.

It strikes too close to home and Loki has to temper the fast beating in his chest before he can speak.

“Perhaps,” Loki says, finally. “If we were immortal together.”

“I am a statute and you are a human,” Thor says. “Would a shared life of immortality be the strangest thing about us?”

Loki chooses to ignore how that makes him feel, as though he’s missed a step and his stomach has dropped and if he looks down he will fall.

“No,” he offers a laugh instead. “It is not strange, it is impossible.”

Thor gives him a glimmer of a smile.

“Who are we to say what is and is not possible?” he asks. “Was it possible for you to be struck by lightning and achieve eternal life?”

“Some dreams are not worth even having,” Loki says by way of answer. He cups Thor’s face and then withdraws his hand. “No matter how sweet they might be.”

No matter how much Loki might wish to have them.

  
xii.

As they turn the corner, walking into the Egyptian exhibit, Loki is surprised to feel an arm slip around his back.

He freezes for a moment and then relaxes.

  
They walk through the Egyptian wing in this manner, Loki explaining to Thor about Ancient Egypt, Thor explaining to Loki about Asgard, and both of them staring with unabashed curiosity and awe at the sarcophaguses, the paintings and etchings on papyrus scrolls, the statues to honor the gods and goddesses, and the stone temple walls.

Loki leans into Thor and Thor, smiling, rests his chin on Loki’s shoulder and they bicker about who was the better civilization, Egypt or Asgard. Neither of them win, but, at the same time, and in a different sense, they both do.  
  
xiii.

The night deepens and the museum’s lights dim and flicker and turn off, until all that’s left on are the emergency lights.

This suits Thor and Loki just fine.

They lay together on the floor by the Temple of Dendur, Loki’s head on Thor’s chest, Thor’s arm around Loki’s shoulder. They talk and laugh by moonlight, the moon bright and a full, clear circle, surrounded by clusters of stars, which they should not be able to see in the city, but which they can anyway. The light streams in through the window panes, which stretch from floor to ceiling.

“Will you watch the sun rise with me?” Thor asks, hours later, as Loki is dozing, eyes flickering open and closed as the heat of Thor’s body lulls him into a sense of complacency.

“Where else would I go, Thor?” he murmurs.

“You always leave me,” Thor says after a moment of silence. His voice is soft, quiet. It’s barely a whisper in this large, cavern of a room. “My time stops when you leave and begins again when you return. I do not exist without you.”

“That’s not true,” Loki says, softly. “I’m the one who cannot make you stay.”

Thor doesn’t say anything to that for a while. Loki feels his hand in his hair, on his neck, stroking down his back.

“Perhaps you should stay with me,” Thor says. “Then we may stay together.”

And to that Loki laughs and turns his face so that his cheek is resting on the slope of Thor’s exposed collarbone.

“Two statues, frozen for eternity.”

“Yes,” Thor admits. He presses a gentle, butterfly kiss to the top of Loki’s head and Loki feels it to the bottom of his toes. “But frozen together.”

  
xiv.

He thinks about that long into the night and when the sun begins to rise, when he and Thor both sit, leaning into one another, Thor’s arms around him, Loki’s fingers at Thor’s wrists, feeling the steady thumping of Thor’s very real and very temporary heartbeat, he is still thinking about it.

He thinks eternity would be bearable, if he could have Thor for himself.

  
xv.

But he can’t.

And as good a liar as he is, Loki cannot keep lying to himself and he cannot keep lying to Thor.

  
xvi.

So when the sun finishes rising, Loki takes Thor by his hand and leads him back to his pedestal.

“Will you come back again tomorrow?” Thor asks, broad, easy smile.

This time, Loki does not answer.

Instead, he takes Thor’s hands and presses his fingers to his mouth, kisses each of them, one by one by one.

“Loki,” Thor says and Loki shakes his head.

“This has been,” Loki says, “the only good night of my entire life.”

Thor softens and Loki kisses his hand again.

“You have been,” he says, “the only good part of my entire life.”

  
xvii.

And when Thor melts back into stone, there’s a heaviness to the sides of his mouth and a sorrow to his eyes which were not there before.

  
xviii.

And when Loki goes home, he sits on his bed and he weeps.

xix.

But he does not come back after that.

His heart is not able to bear it.

 **  
**  
**part five.**

  


i.  
  
Thor does not wake up again for a long while.

  
ii.  
  
Then, one night, he does.  


It is dark and storming outside and when the marble melts away, it leaves him breathing quickly underneath, eyes flickering, mind weary and confused.

There is no one in the gallery except for him.

No tourists, no guards, no Loki.

Thor cannot help it. He knows Loki will not come back, but he cannot stop his heart for longing for him. He misses Loki with the ferocity of an entire realm resting on the tops of his shoulders. He misses him with an ache that leaves him empty and quaking.

He knows Loki will not come back, but he looks for him anyway.

And that is when he sees the man with golden eyes.

Thor remembers something, someone, distantly.

“Have you brought me back to life?” he asks.

Heimdall smiles.

“You have been asleep for too long, your Highness.”

“I do not remember you,” Thor says.

“That is all right,” Heimdall says. “It is my job to remember, not yours.”

“I do not wish to be awake if Loki is not here,” Thor says with a frown.

“You would give up your own eternity, your own people, for this human?” Heimdall asks. He tilts his head just so, but even so, it is not a judgmental look. It is a test.

“What do I have but for him?” Thor asks. “I am not a god, I am a statue.”

“Ah,” Heimdall says. “You can be both, Thor.”

And Thor is not like Loki, he does not have cleverness born on his tongue. So he is not sure what Heimdall means.

Outside, a flash of lightning tears through the sky.

“A storm is coming, your Highness,” Heimdall says.

“I have never been afraid of storms,” Thor says.

Another flash of lightning and the entire sculpture gallery lights up for a brief, blazing moment.

“But you know someone who has,” Heimdall says. “He is afraid. Show him how not to be.”

  
*

  
i.  
  
Loki doesn’t remember coming back to the museum. He doesn’t remember making the conscious decision to do so.

What he remembers is being home and being alone and being so very, very afraid of the storm outside.

It’s a night very much like another one he remembers, from so long ago, and the fear of it keeps him from functioning. He cannot move his limbs. He can barely remember how to breathe.

So his feet move of their own accord and he stares up at the opening to the museum before he realizes where he is and it is far, far after hours, but there is a light on near the door anyway.

He approaches, with no awareness of what he’s doing, and he finds Heimdall waiting for him, a smile on his face.

Loki doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even know why he is here.

But Heimdall requires nothing from him.

He opens the door and stands aside.

  
*

  
iii.

He turns and he finds him shivering, nearly shaking. Loki looks pale and small and afraid and Thor hesitates only a moment before sweeping him up in his arms.

Thunder rumbles across the stormy sky outside and Loki _does_ shake then.

“I am here,” Thor says. “Can you not see that? I am real and I am here.”

Loki holds onto Thor and he shakes his head, burying his face into his chest.

“I don’t know why I’m so afraid of lightning,” he says. “I don’t know why I fear it being taken away.”

“What?” Thor asks. He pulls back and cups Loki’s face. “What will be taken away?”

“My life,” Loki says.

  
*

  
ii.

Which makes little sense, because Loki has been wanting to die for a very, very long time.

  
iii.

But it is possible that now he has something he wishes to continue living for. And that, more than anything else, terrifies him.

  
*

  
iv.  
  
The thunder blasts through the sky and the gallery lights up again, flash bright.

Loki encircles Thor’s waist and Thor holds him close, closer than he has ever held anyone else before. He soothes his hand down Loki’s back, he presses kisses into his hair.

He whispers, “I am here. You are safe. I am here.”

  
v. 

And what happens then, only gods could have foreseen.

Or, maybe, just Heimdall.

  
*

iv.  
  
Loki peels back from Thor just enough to see his face, beautiful and grave, heartbroken and overjoyed, illuminated by the lightning.

And the way Thor looks at him, Loki knows Thor would sacrifice entire worlds for him.

And the way Thor reaches down to kiss him, Loki knows he would sacrifice his entire eternity, an eternity of eternities, for Thor.

  
*

  
vi.  
  
Thor frames his face and looks into his eyes. He whispers, _I exist only for you_ , and he leans down to close the distance between them.

  
vii.

Thor kisses Loki, and lightning strikes them both down.

 **  
**  
**part six.**

  
  
Loki wakes up, hand on Thor’s chest, aching and disoriented. Thor, next to him, lies, eyes open, mouth askew, still and in shock.

“Thor,” Loki says and when Thor doesn’t move or respond, a little more desperately, “ _Thor_.”

He presses against Thor’s chest, cups his face, strokes his hair.

Thor doesn’t respond.

Thor, the God of Thunder, struck down by lightning.

“You cannot be the God of Thunder, killed by lightning,” Loki hisses. “That is too embarrassing, even for you. Idiot!”

So he does the only thing he can in his panic, which is to bend forward and press his mouth against Thor’s.

He kisses Thor and under his kiss, Thor comes alive again.

  
Thor’s hand shoots out and he grasps Loki’s arm. He gasps like a fish out of water.

“Shh,” Loki says. He presses kisses to Thor’s brow. “Shh, you are fine. You are dramatic, but fine.”

Thor grasps Loki’s face, pats his head and his shoulders.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Thor,” Loki says. “I am fine.”

Thor kisses him again, deeply. Loki feels it spread through him like fire or move through him like molten lava. He feels Thor’s kiss as though they have been struck by lightning again, as though they will be struck by lightning again and again, each time they touch, forevermore.

“I said I was fine,” Loki says, when he finally pulls away, flushed and pleased, heart beating rapidly.

“I know,” Thor grins. “I just wanted to do that again.”

Loki laughs and pushes him away. He gets to his feet and helps Thor to his own.

They look around them, expecting to see shattered glass, broken sculptures, any indication that they were both struck by a force of nature.

There is nothing. The gallery is silent.

Outside, they look, and the sky has calmed.

“Look,” Thor says. “The storm has disappeared.”

 **  
**  
**part seven.**

  
Depending on how you look at it, this ends in one of two ways.

  
*

  
i.  
  
Outside, the sky is growing lighter. The morning is coming swiftly, sweetly, with the promise of heartbreak and hope all the same.

“I am sorry,” Loki tells Thor.

“I did not think I would ever see you again,” Thor says. He holds Loki’s face between his hands. He cannot seem to let go.

“I was afraid,” Loki says. “I loved you too much.”

“So you would kill us both to keep us from love?” Thor asks.

“I would kill us both to keep us from heartbreak,” Loki says.

Thor softens and laughs at the same time. It’s a gentle thing and Loki feels his chest swell with the expansive air of love. He was stupid for thinking he could survive without it. His lungs would collapse with this oxygen.

“You are so very stupid, Loki,” Thor says. “You have lived for so long and still, you are so stupid.”

Loki huffs and Thor laughs and then they move back together again.

  
ii.  
  
“I will not live without you,” Thor says.

They can hear the birds outside now. After the storm, all of the sounds and colors are fresh and sweet and clear.

“I do not wish to live without you,” Loki says.

“Then, we shall live and not live together,” Thor says.

To which, Loki raises an eyebrow.

To which, Thor offers his hand.

  
iii.

It is not even a question. It does not take Loki but a breath to decide.

If the decision is an eternity with Thor or an eternity without him, Loki will pick him each, and every, time.  


Loki takes Thor’s hand and steps onto the pedestal with him.

  
iv.  
  
At the far end of the sculpture gallery, there sits a stone bench. When the museum opens the next morning, a man with black dreadlocks hanging down his back sits there. On his lap is a sketchpad, in his hand charcoal pencils.

He is not much of an artist, but for this one piece, he will put his eyes to a sculpture and that sculpture to paper.

He draws for hours and then, when finished, he gets up, tears out the page, and approaches the statute. At the base, is an inscription, which he reads.

 _Thor and Loki_ , it says. _Eternal lovers, crafted of lightning._

  
He looks up at the sculpture then, a golden, magnificent warrior and a young man with the joys of immortal life etched across his face, standing side by side, arm through arm, leaning into one another in a way that is unmistakable for what it is--love, devotion, eternal happiness. The man looks over the sculpture and the corner of his golden eyes crinkle.

He leaves the drawing at the base of the sculpture, turns, and leaves.

  
It seems like a prayer, almost.

  
v.  
  
The next morning, that drawing is gone.

But, curiously, if one were to look at the statues closer, they would find the young man with the bright eyes and strangely youthful face holding a sheet of paper that was not there even the night before.

 

*

  
Or,

  
i.

Outside, the sky is growing lighter. The morning is coming swiftly, sweetly, with the promise of heartbreak and hope all the same.

“I am sorry,” Loki tells Thor.

“I did not think I would ever see you again,” Thor says. He holds Loki’s face between his hands. He cannot seem to let go.

“I was afraid,” Loki says. “I loved you too much.”

“What were you afraid of?” Thor asks.

Loki clutches at the front of Thor’s tunic, fingers curled into the material. He holds him close because they have been struck by lightning and they have lived and he cannot bear to let him go now, at the end of it all.

“Of living forever,” Loki says. “Of continuing to live forever, without you.”

“Where would I go?” Thor laughs and echoes back what Loki said to him earlier. And then, softer, “Where else would I go, Loki?”

“I want to have you with me,” Loki says then. He admits it because he can no longer swallow it whole. “I want to have you for always.”

“Then you have me,” Thor says. “Then you must take me.”

  
ii.  
  
Which is foolish, but Loki cannot help the hope that flutters in his stomach.

“We don’t know what will happen,” he says. “If you leave here.”

“Nothing worse than if I stay,” Thor says. It’s sculpted across his brow, his unwavering determination. Waves will break on the rock of his willpower.  

It is stupid, it is utterly foolish, but Thor gathers Loki into his arms and Loki feels Thor’s hands on his back, and they stay this way until one or both of them gain the courage to step back.

Loki wants to feel those hands on his back for the rest of his life. For this, he will sacrifice anything.

  
iii.

They stop at the empty pedestal first.

For a moment, Loki is tempted to climb up on there, to take Thor’s place altogether.

For a moment, Thor is tempted to climb back up there, to where it is safe and he is known.

He touches the base, lets his fingernails catch on the dips of the engraving.

“It seems far more faded than I remember,” Thor says.

“That’s what happens with time,” Loki says. He doesn’t look at the base at all. He looks at the lines of Thor’s back again, broad and clean and expansive. He steps forward and runs his fingers down the red velvet, touches every dip and divot he can feel.

Thor breathes out unevenly and Loki wraps his arms around him from the back.

“What if we don’t go?” Loki asks.

Thor leans back into him and exhales. It is even this time.

“We must.”

  
iv.  
  
And so they do. One step at a time, one room at a time.

Thor leaves behind the sculpture gallery and does not look back.  
  
  
He and Loki hold one another’s hands and when they reach the door, the door that will lead them outside, the one that will lead them to the top of the steps and over the steps and out into the world, they pause again.

“Will you draw me?” Thor asks, suddenly. “Even if I do not make it?”

Loki grips Thor’s hand tighter.

“Will you draw me from memory, even if I do not exist anymore in this world?”

Loki lets out a shaky breath and nods.

“Of course, Thor,” he says. “I’ll make sure you live forever.”

Thor squeezes Loki’s hand, takes a deep, deep breath, and steps out into the morning.

  
v.

“Oh,” Thor says, taken aback. He shields his eyes with his flesh hand, squinting against the incomparable morning sun.

“Oh,” Loki breathes out, beaming. He lets out a sigh of relief, a breath he had not known he had been holding.

He leans up, tugs Thor down, and kisses him.

  
And after that, he keeps his promise. He makes sure Thor lives, forever.

  
*

  
Whichever ending you choose--whichever ending they chose, it is all the same at the end.

Loki and Thor, both unmoored, both alone, both lost, having found one another, then refuse to leave one another ever again.

From now until the end of eternity, they become immortals, in whatever way they choose, and in every way that matters.  


That is, they live, the both of them, forever, and, most importantly, together.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! :) If you have a spare thought or comment, I would love them. Otherwise, please join me at [@spacerenegades](http://spacerenegades.tumblr.com) for more Gay Content!


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